The Value of Straw

Saint Thomas Aquinas, God love his soul, would never have disparaged a heap of straw if he’d known its value.

Just a week ago my garden was in dire need of straw. I use it for mulching, filling in all the spots between plants so the weeds can’t pop up, for keeping the soil moist and for returning nutrients. I also use straw to grow potatoes. Potatoes demand to be tortured; you must dump coffee grounds over them so the soil is acidic, and then bury them up to their necks. Every time a potato plant gets to be over six inches, you bury it up to its neck again. Just keep burying until the plants are in a mound that towers over your garden. The stems become more roots, from which more tubers can grow. Tubers are like contemplative souls– they require darkness and suffering. So you bury potatoes, and keep burying them deep.

If you bury your potatoes in soil, you have to dig out the tubers with a shovel at the end of the season. But if you bury them in straw, you can just move the straw out of the way. Trouble is, there’s already soil in my garden. It came with the house when we rented the place. It goes right down to the bedrock. But there’s no straw in my garden. Straw, you have to find, make or buy. And we’d dug up the yard for a garden, so I couldn’t just let the lawn grow high and then make my own straw. I looked up the cost of straw– two to ten dollars, depending on who you ask, for a small bale, and just hope your bale doesn’t have herbicides or any nasties like that in it.

I didn’t know what to do. This is my usual state; I never garden with all of my ducks in a row. Nobody ever does, really. Nature doesn’t allow that kind of thing. You’ll always find yourself stumped. But I knew even less than usual what to do about the potatoes. Our compost heap was full of eggshells and half-rotted apples– my daughter never eats more than half an apple, and then she drops it on the carpet so it gets too linty for anyone else to eat. That compost wasn’t nearly decayed enough to use as soil to bury potatoes, and it would be useless for mulching.  I mentioned that I needed straw money when I next said my prayers, but no money appeared.

That Saturday morning, I realized there was no coffee in the house. I took the bus to the grocery store early, while my husband watched Rose. I hadn’t had my fifth of the month treat yet, so I bought myself breakfast and a bottle of cold coffee to enjoy while I waited for the bus back.

On the way home, I saw it. I could scarcely believe my eyes. Someone was mowing The Vacant Lot. People who live in Steubenville know what I’m talking about– on just about every populated street there’s at least one lot where a house was demolished or burned down, which was then left abandoned until the grass and weeds grow high as an untouched prairie grass. When I had a guinea pig, I used to graze her on the big purple clover at the vacant lot near our apartment house. Now that I have a daughter, I tend to view the local vacant lots as nuisances, hideouts for rats and opossums.

The particular vacant lot near my house was the size of two neighborhood houses. It was filled with grass that was shoulder-high, dry and nearly dead. And someone was mowing it on a riding mower. I pressed my face to the bus window as we passed. I observed the fresh, golden clippings shooting out the side of the riding mower. I was so excited I nearly missed my stop.

When I got home, I threw down my bags in the kitchen. I grabbed a trash bag and the rolling market basket, and I shouted to my husband that I was going to get straw.

When I got back, the gentleman had parked his riding mower and was blowing the grass off of the sidewalk. He stared at me in the usual Ohio Valley way.

“Do you mind if I take a bag of straw for my garden?” I asked.

“Knock yerself out, sweetheart!” said the man. And he said more than that. He said I could come back for more if I wanted.  He said he would use his blower to blow some of the clippings into a pile by the sidewalk. He honestly didn’t want any grass clippings. The man was giving away a heap of straw. He acted as though I was doing him a favor.

I filled my bag and my basket. I dragged them home. I came back with two bags; then, later, I came back with my daughter. We knelt in the field like Ruth and Naomi, gleaning armload after armload of rich, warm, sweet-smelling, sun-dried grass. We carried it back, dumped it on the compost heap, and went back for more. In all, we got eight bags of straw. My compost heap turned into a four-foot haystack.

Half that straw is on the garden or on my potatoes, now, and there’ll be enough to see me through the summer.

Everything is grace. If I hadn’t gotten my straw, if I hadn’t found a substitute, if my whole crop had died and I had died with it, Christ would still have been Christ and He would have turned it to good.

But it’s wonderful when grace looks and smells like a heap of straw. I would be honored, if anything I wrote had the value of a heap of straw.

(image via pixabay)